Checking Out ... First Game of Relic Knights
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Relic Knights – Ah summer, the draw of the outdoors: pools, beaches, fresh air, sunny skies, longer hours of daylight ... all these things kill my weekly game night. Attendance to my midweek game night is sporadic at best during the late summer months so it's the best time to try out new games and fumble through the initial games with a lighter attendance.
For my first game of Relic Knights using the printed rules. I opted to use the Speed Circuit and my friend opted to use the Black Diamond. We just used the starter boxes (or equivalent for the Speed Circuit) which put us at about 30 points.
For set-up we followed the walk-through in the book and played on the Library Board I started way back when the Relic Knight kickstarter was fresh and I was stoked about the game (the delay killed my enthusiasm for the board, however having the models I now need to finish it up because it works really good). My primary mission was to infused objective counters, secondary was to drop a token at the furthest board edge and my faction specific was to do one of the above before I drew through my deck. My opponent had to grab tokens from my primary and dump them on the board edge, assassinate Rynn, and his faction specific was to take tokens from his objective to the board edge.
Here's the way I remember the game:
I rushed my Belles out to start doing my primary (should be easy with a move 10 right?) and quickly realized that infuse means spending held esper to accomplish the goal. Not gonna happen with the Belles as they're to fragile to sit in the open for round while they focus to gain esper. So I instead focused on reaching the board edge before I burned through my deck. They proceeded to get the crap shot out of them and I realized the beauty of drawing cards every time you're targeted. With the draws I was able to guard against half of the attacks and survive the initial onslaught. After a few activations I was able to reach the board edge with 1 card left in my deck to score 5 points. Prior to them being annihilated by the tank.
I didn't take a ton of notes during the game but the summary above really captures the jist of what happened. As this is the first time with the system there was a lot of stopping to look things up and double checking rules. We also made a few mistakes that may have made a difference in the game. But overall it was easy to figure out the symbols are pretty intuitive and once you've done a few activations it starts to feel natural. The big thing we kept forgetting to do is the follow-up move and announcing our guards prior to the active player announcing their pushes.
I'll post a detailed review of the system and book after I finish reading it and get a few more games in. My first impressions are this is easy to teach, quick to play and really fun. I could see this becoming my skirmish game of choice once I see how it works in multiplayer.
